'Story-telling, the pleasure of sitting in close company and listening to a story, allowing oneself to float free in the moment and enter, both in the senses and in imagination, into the story's events so that the story becomes our own, must be one of the oldest and earliest of our pleasures - a function of that uniquely human faculty in us, the capacity to step beyond the actual into the possible.' (Introduction)

'According to Said, exile is a condition of terminal loss, "an unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home," which involves "the crippling sorrow of estrangement" (173). According to Homi Bhabha, "colonial mimicry is, among other things, the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite" (86). [...]Ovid needs to integrate himself with the other to experience a meaningful life and sense of belonging. According to Robert Massey and Khawla Abu-Baker, "The I of each person actively coordinates the me into a self-image based on past and present experiences and future anticipations of self with others" (14).' (Publication abstract)

'This paper will investigate creative dislocation and the idea of the writer as exiled self through reflections on the traction and slippages between ideas of place, dislocation and writing. For a writer, producing creative work through the experience of dislocation, whether voluntary or enforced, can be isolating and difficult, but it can also bring new perspectives and opportunities for creative capacity and expression. The creative resonances of writing in exile will be explored here with reference to David Malouf’s celebrated novella An Imaginary Life (1978) in which he depicts exile as a necessary journey of becoming, a ‘dynamic marginality’ as Braidotti observes (2002: 129), which offers creative possibility rather than closure and loss. For the writer Ovid, dislocation is phenomenological prerequisite for selftransformation. His discovery is that the writer must always be at the edge of things, noticing differently, available to possibility, able to embody and to channel being as metamorphoses through creative expression.' (Publication abstract)

'The ecology of a culture may be as fragile, as precariously balanced, as the one we call Nature. We should be very sure of how that balance has been achieved and continues to work before we think of adjusting or ‘improving’ it.' (Introduction)